by Ann Pancake
Betty shook her head. She didn’t either.
“But there as we were closing down, that usher—I can’t recall his name, I think he was from over in Chesapeake—he tried to shake the guy awake. And a mouse jumped out of his mouth.”
Betty shivered and cupped her cross.
“We never saw that usher again.”
As always, Janie would be standing between Tommie Sue, on the end of the counter nearest ticket sales, and the sorority girls, huddled at the other end past the pop machine. During the stories, Betty would swivel around on her ticket-seller stool and listen without smiling—these were the only times Betty did not smile—and that Betty, practical, even-tempered, cheerful, Christian, never questioned a syllable Tommie Sue spoke and affirmed many with nods made it all triply terrifying.
“And that’s not all,” Tommie Sue said, her big, round, darkish glasses amplifying bigger, rounder, darker her cloudy black eyes. Just then Gus barreled around the corner to catch them idle. Tommie Sue didn’t blink. “That ain’t even counting what all’s happened in the old parts.” She said her ain’ts with an elegance.
Gus clapped his hands on his hips, the bloated keychain quivering on his belt like a grenade, and glowered at Tommie Sue. He had to lift his chin to do it. Tommie Sue stared back, a nonchalant blankness. “Somebody get down there and check those restrooms!” Gus blared.
Sprawling underneath the ground floor, the Alexander Henry’s bathrooms were bigger than many modern theaters altogether. To reach them, you descended a wide staircase covered with a once-red carpet now faded pinkish at its edges and in the middle worn down to mole-colored padding. Despite the clarity of her childhood Alexander Henry memories, Janie could not recall, no matter how hard she tried, ever entering these bathrooms before she became a popcorn girl. Some never-seen janitor cleaned the bathrooms in the mornings before the matinees, but then the popcorn girls were expected to do hourly checks. If you were appointed, you had to go down in the middle of the movies, when the fewest people would be using them. None of the other popcorn girls seemed to mind it. Janie pretended she didn’t either.
Each pink-gray step deeper, her shoulders knitted tighter, her head drained lighter. Once you reached the bottom, before you even entered the rooms with the stalls, you had to pass through odd preliminaries, rooms random and with no apparent purpose, as though they’d been donated from other buildings. A room with nothing but sinks. A room with a gas fireplace and a mantle piled with broken bricks and musty couches that looked upholstered with shorthaired hounds. A tall, narrow, lightless room containing a single empty cot and three locked doors. By the time Janie got to the actual toilets, her panic had spread from her head and shoulders through her whole body, chilling even her fingers, her toes, but she still had the wherewithal to intone to herself, “You’re eighteen years old, Janie. Janie, you’re eighteen years old.”
Then she was at the threshold of the stalls, stepping into the shock of fluorescent lights. The floor here was a vertiginous checkerboard of disintegrating black-and-white tiles the size of record albums, some chipped, some cracked, some missing completely and in their place what looked like earth coming up. And there wasn’t simply one room of stalls. There were three, end to end. The closed stalls ran on and on to Janie’s right, their wooden doors freshly painted the color of flesh, and to her left, the infinite mirrors, so many opportunities to find a dead body, everything resplendently lit. Janie quick-clicked down the broken tile floor in her cheap Heck’s work loafers as fast as she could without breaking into a full run—because always, in a small corner of her huge vague fear, a specific little fear that she might run into a live person down here and all her infantile fears would be found out—her heart now surging like a body-big bellows, all of her, from guts to throat to ears, gorged with that bellowing heart. She kept her head turned slightly to the right, one eye on the tile, the other on the stall doors, all of her resisting the horrific pull-to of the mirrors. But now and again, in the far corner of her left eye, unavoidable, a flash of her red popcorn girl smock, her black popcorn girl pants, but Janie resisting, refusing, to look full-on, for fear of . . . what? She thought she knew. For fear of what she might see in the mirror with her.
Until she reached the end, whirled around, and did it all in reverse.
Then she’d burst back up into the relief of the mute lobby lights after the bathroom blare. She’d pause on the top step until her breathing evened. She straightened her smock and ran her fingers through her bangs. Then, when her hands stopped shaking, she’d initial the restroom check-sheet where it hung on a clipboard near the time clock.
It never did occur to her to cheat and not walk the whole thing.
RELAXED, NATHAN ALWAYS looked sleepy. This contrast made his outbursts even more electrifying, when they weren’t directed at Janie, and they rarely were. Even so, now that he and she were a couple, her role in the tantrums changed from those early days in the garage when she and Uncle Bobby could just watch. Now Nathan’s upset became in part her responsibility, to placate, to make right, an obligation not exactly imposed by Nathan, and not learned by Janie by having watched Melissa with him, but something Janie knew intuitively herself. Knew it was her job, but had almost no idea how to go about it. So that when he finally did calm, her relief was so profound it was intoxication on its own.
She met Nathan’s friends, the languid, belt-thin pothead boys familiar to Janie from home. Nathan the shortest of them all, and it amazed her how he could be so small and at the same time the most cocksure in any group. She’d assumed growing up in the city would have made the friends more sophisticated, but that wasn’t the case at all. Like it had with those boys back home, the weed fertilized their indifference and dulled their desires, so that they floated, day in, day out, in a complacent sag. This was another way Nathan stood out. The fuse in his belly, the periodic bombs—they also made him more alive.
Because he still slept in his childhood bed across the hall from his parents, they did it in his Chevrolet Scout. In his father’s pickup camper shell. Once standing up along the wall in the clean concrete smell of the basement, his teeth clenching his bottom lip. They did it on the ground wherever the motorcycle stopped, in the blackberried brush between the river road and the Ohio dock, many times on a sheet of plastic in the head-high weeds at the base of one of the old factories, only yards away cars echoing in the metal ravine. Once, after a seven-hour partying marathon that included sneaking into the drive-in, crashing an outdoor party with a band playing some strain of violent country, and buying weed from a pothead friend’s father (a man with the oil-slicked hair of the 1950s and who dealt while sitting in a barber chair he kept in his basement like a parodic throne), they ended up at 4 AM in a dew-soaked field beyond a couple tract homes. Janie without the remotest idea where they were and her obligated to be up, clean, and sober in time for 10 AM church. Nathan always came quick, she never did at all, and neither expected anything different.
The truth was, for Janie, the bodies were almost incidental. For her, sex enchanted for the same reasons as drugs and alcohol. The quick, easy intimacy, the crumbling of the barrier between herself and other people, the way during sex it was impossible to hold herself apart not only from him, but apart from herself. The mist of transcendence the sex showered over ordinary things, and later, Janie’d remember not the quick, hard thrusts, the skin on skin, but the little fog lifting off that field in the almost-dawn afterwards. She’d remember the scent of sycamores and river from the seat of the bike on the ride home, remember how the act drained both of them like an abscess, from him, his anger, his frustration, from her, her self-consciousness and anxiety. And also afterwards, a tenderness in him she never saw otherwise for longer than a few seconds, a vulnerability, and she knew it wasn’t like that with many boys when they finished, but it was for him.
Once in a while among those pallid, droopy, dope-loving boys, Nathan might make a remark about her. Janie would flinch, and the boys would snicker, but o
nly a little and usually uneasily, and after a few seconds, Janie would think, that wasn’t what he meant, was it? Sometimes for a day or two he seemed to ignore her for no reason, then say he hadn’t when she got up the nerve to ask him why he had, and then she’d have to replay the whole period in her head—so she’d just imagined it, right? She must have. Sometimes when she and Uncle Bobby hung around watching Nathan work in the basement, Nathan might not even acknowledge them, it all depended on his mood, but she knew he had to concentrate when he was working on the Harley and how exasperated it made him. Besides, his distractedness then and elsewhere meant she, too, could be by herself and with him at the same time. Meant she didn’t have to think of things to say. And when he finally did come back, and touched her cheekbone, or sleepy-smiled with his eyes locked onto hers, or patted the back of his bike seat, his attentions radiated all the more brilliantly because of their absence before.
Janie’s aunt came down to visit for a weekend. On Sunday afternoon, while Janie was helping her load the car, the aunt stopped Janie by the rosebushes, well out of earshot of Janie’s grandmother and grandfather.
“Janie, Bobby can’t handle drinking.” She looked Janie in the eye, but not mean like her own mother would have. She looked worried and even awkward. She was only a year older than Uncle Bobby, much younger than Janie’s mother, and she’d always been the cool aunt. Janie, her face warm, shifted her eyes to a dandelion in a driveway crack. “You understand that, right?” the aunt asked.
“Yeah,” Janie said. Then mumbled, “But he loves it when we go out.”
“And Nathan Simmons,” her aunt went on, not responding to the Uncle Bobby excuse, “he doesn’t treat you right.” She looked hard at Janie again, and Janie thought she saw her mouth start to move, but then her aunt stopped.
As Janie, Uncle Bobby, and her grandparents waved to her aunt backing into the street, Janie hung back, a dark quaver in her chest. Then she reminded herself that her aunt was approaching forty and couldn’t grasp the nuances of either the Uncle Bobby or the Nathan situation.
ONE HOT SATURDAY morning after two days of Nathan’s keeping his distance, he called her and asked her to go with him to the lake. She hadn’t known there was a lake.
She stepped cautious into the driveway where he was hitching the aluminum fishing boat to his father’s truck. She paused there, uncertain whether he’d noticed her or not, him bent over the ball hitch and his white T-shirt riding up his back. The narrowness of his waist riding out of his Levi’s, the gap between denim and skin. Janie raised her eyes and tried to read his mood from the side of his face, but then he finally turned, and his smile broke out full, and in the light off him, Janie lightened, too.
Then they were pulling away down Kentworth Drive, and the sky actually blue, exceptional for a late-morning July in Remington, West Virginia, where summer sky was usually the color of pale metal. Janie was drunk before they hit the city limits, as though the half-beer she put in herself as they headed out of town ignited the alcohol left in her body from the night before, and she dropped her head back and gazed into that uncommon blue sky. Over her eyes settled a kind of squishy glass, something that often happened when she got drunk in broad day, so that she saw everything, but saw it pleasantly distorted and at a padded distance. And all along, Nathan was talking to her, gentle-teasing, a mood almost as extraordinary as the sky, and Janie heard herself, more extraordinary, talking, and she understood Nathan was listening, and Janie thought, this is how couples are. Couples who love each other. This is how couples are together. Now they were winding through daylit hills that before they’d only ridden at night, and Janie, with the abysmal sense of direction of those who’ve lived their whole lives in one little place, became, as usual, completely disoriented, and that lostness, as usual, forced her to give over even more to Nathan, and she felt the savor of the fear in that giving over.
They finally reached the lake, not much more than a pond, Janie saw, its parking lot crawling with people like themselves. Then she and Nathan were putting in the aluminum boat with all the other people putting in their aluminum boats, all the others, too, with heavy loaded coolers and fishing poles like props, everyone else, too, drunk, but lazy drunk, not fighting drunk. Nathan was behind her now, his hand on the muted chuffing of the outboard, them moving just faster than a drift. And Janie bask-lazed in that similarity between themselves and the other couples, in the miracle of Nathan’s contentment, in how he wanted her there in full light, how seldom they did anything together in the day. The two of them in a comfortable silence now, the kind that settles after you have had a conversation and followed it to its natural easy end. The squishy lens still padding her eyes, Janie leaned over the boat edge and towards the water, a second layer to look through. The grasses slimy waving under them and the algaed stones on the bottom, hypnotic.
It might have been fifteen minutes, it might have been forty, when she heard Nathan, his voice like ice water but with just a hint of taunt. “Miss Melissa Kendrick.”
Janie’s head snapped up. Sliding by, not ten feet distant, was another aluminum boat. A boat so like their own boat that if Janie had come up on them side by side in the parking lot, she wouldn’t have been able to tell which from which. The other boat moving exactly parallel to theirs, but in the opposite direction, and in its bow, as Janie was in theirs, sat Melissa.
By the time Janie looked, Melissa was directly across from her. Melissa’s blonde hair in drifts of perfectly executed curls clear to her shoulders, the hair immobile yet not stiff, her face meticulously, but not excessively, made up. Her features sharper than Janie’s, Melissa had grown into them, they fit her, while Janie’s face still floated in baby and beer fat. Melissa wore a bikini, her body big and small exactly where it should be, Janie in a one-piece with a pair of shorts pulled over to hide her thighs. Melissa was beautiful in the way favored by both Remington and McCloud County, so the way favored by Janie, too, and under the foundation, behind the mascara, Janie looked for surprise, anger, hurt, jealousy. But by the time Janie saw Melissa, the face had already been blocked off.
Janie registered all this in just a few seconds, both boats moving on their slow, opposed courses, and now Melissa was gone altogether and it was the man in the stern Janie faced. Him turned halfway, like Nathan was, with a hand on the tiller, his thick, earth-colored hair buckling out from under a black Walker cap. There was a heaviness to his body, to his bare torso, although he was not at all fat, his skin the kind of brown, layers deep, of men who work outside. His face was not as fine as Nathan’s, the face had a heaviness to it, too, and a pair of grooves from the sides of his nose to the corners of his mouth. The face of a man. Which—it occurred to Janie for the first time, there’d been no reason for it to occur before—Nathan’s was not.
After Nathan’s “Miss Melissa Kendrick,” the whole tableau unfolded in silence.
When stern had passed stern, the two boats completely clear of each other, Nathan gunned their motor. He straight-lined it back to the ramp, their wake wobbling and shaking the peacefully drunk others bobbing about, it all happening so quickly, Nathan moving so fast, that only a few even had time to muster a “Hey!” or give them the finger.
They drove all the way back to Kentworth Drive without exchanging a word, Nathan silent-screaming from every pore. Janie, tiny on her side of the seat, soberness fast overtaking her, and how she hated to go sober when she was still awake, and this in the worst of circumstances. The squishiness melted from her eyes, the sweet distance it imposed collapsed. And she knew Nathan’s rage, his pain, had little to do with her, and she waited to feel pain herself, or jealous, or mad, but nothing came. Aside from a general miserableness, nothing came but the other man’s face. That face she had read. Surprise, yes, but brighter than that, guilt. And she saw too, despite the bulky brown body, despite him being so much bigger than Nathan, you could tell that even when he sat, despite all that, Janie saw he was scared.
“YOU KNOW THOSE box seats they’ve g
ot stuck up on the side walls?” It was late Sunday afternoon after the Saturday lake incident, that dead hour before her grandmother would call them to help her with supper. Janie lay on her stomach on Uncle Bobby’s bed, her head at its foot, her bare feet on his pillows where Tina curled. Fresh from his shower after his shift, Uncle Bobby rocked in his recliner, Old Spice flavoring the room, and the air conditioner throbbed in the window, the sky outside cement-colored again. When her grandmother called them, Uncle Bobby would set the table, the napkin rings, the cloth napkins, the water pitcher. Janie would construct the salad, Jell-O squares in little nests of iceberg lettuce, or, her favorite, Seven Layer, with bacon and frozen peas. Napkins in their laps, they’d say the blessing before they ate, they’d please and they’d thank you, and every second, without looking, they’d feel the other’s strain to be finished and go out.
“Yeah?” Uncle Bobby said.
“Well, they’re fake. There’s not even a door to get into them. That’s just paint.” She hadn’t seen Nathan since he’d told her to go home when she tried to help him unhitch the boat. He’d left twice on the motorcycle after that. Once shortly after they’d returned from the lake. Again, Uncle Bobby had reported when she asked, while she was working Saturday night.
“I know that, Janie.” It was the soft studiedly understated tone, both pitying and slightly embarrassed for her, that he used when she didn’t know something he thought she should. When he knew more than she did, he was always sympathetic. “I thought you knew that. I thought you knew that, Janie.”
“Also”—Janie pulled Tina down to where she could stroke her back—“Tommie Sue says the basement and the bathrooms aren’t as deep as the Alexander Henry goes.”
“What do you mean, Janie?”
“She says there are levels under the bathroom that run all under the whole city block.” Janie hadn’t believed this at first, but reliable Ronnie, with his rubber-band legs, his transparent moustache, who’d worked at the Alexander Henry for five years, said, yes, he went down there all the time to check the heating and air-conditioning.
